Admin of an anarchist Mastodon server raided by FBI, insecure user data gets seized

ezmack@lemmy.ml to Technology@lemmy.ml – 326 points –
Admin of an anarchist Mastodon server raided by FBI, insecure user data gets seized
neowin.net
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Well thats worrying for everyone federated with them.

oh no! they have all the posts that people publicly posted onto the Internet!

Is it? As far as I know, identifying data such as IP addresses are not transmitted between instances.

The only instance that knows your IP and has your hashed password is the one you signed up on

Why?

Maybe the thinking is that whatever that server was raided for may have been federated to other servers, making them also targets for FBI raids.

Edit: Looks like the admin was raided for participating in a protest and the Mastodon instance wasn't the target at all, in which case why did they take that data at all?

Does anyone have a eli5 explanation/read/video of being federated? When I joined lemmy i thought it was lemmy exclusive thing, but now it seems being federated is a copy of your data shared among servers that multiple communities/applications use including outside entities, such as lemmy communicating w/ mastodon? Or am I way off? Any explanation would be greatly appreciated help me get up to speed.

Lemmy & KBin & Mastodon & Misskey & Calckey & others all use the ActivityPub protocol to deliver posts to your inbox no matter which account / software created the post in the first place.

How the posts are interpreted changes a bit depending on what software was used to create and display your inbox.

This is very much like how email works in Outlook & Gmail, but how the labels or tagging changes depending on which you use.

Try this video:

https://youtu.be/S57uhCQBEk0

@CuckyMcCuckyFace